Director's Letter Winter 2014

In 1943, at the height of World War II, a group that ultimately grew to include some 345 men and women from thirteen nations was recruited to protect Europe’s great art treasures. Formed under the Civil Affairs and Military Government Sections of the Allied Armies, the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA) worked in some of the most dangerous and war-torn locations in Europe first to safeguard, where possible, historic and cultural monuments from war damage and then, as the war came to an end, to find and return Europe’s art treasures that had either been stolen by the Nazi regime or put into safekeeping during the worst of the war.

Known as the Monuments Men, these servicemen and women were commissioned by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and operated out of a command center at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. But the Monuments Men themselves often worked in the most precarious of circumstances, moving one small step ahead of invading armies or dodging landmines installed in some of Europe’s most contested landscapes. This was the first time in history that an army had been fighting a war while officially seeking to reduce damage to the world’s cultural heritage; General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces, personally prohibited looting and destruction of buildings of cultural significance. 

Few institutions in the United States are more connected with the history and legacy of the Monuments Men than the Princeton University Art Museum. Two of my predecessors as director served with distinction as Monuments Men. Ernest DeWald (1891–1968) carried out his graduate studies at Princeton (completing his Ph.D. in 1916) and was a scholar of medieval and Renaissance art who joined the Princeton faculty in 1925, recruited by then-chair of the Art and Archaeology Department Charles Rufus Morey. By the time DeWald rejoined the army—he had served in World War I as well—he was a middle-aged man knowingly putting himself in harm’s way, typical of many of the Monuments Men. After the war, Rutgers awarded DeWald an honorary doctorate for his service, and he became director of the Princeton museum in 1947, serving until his retirement in 1960. In 1950, the Austrian  government honored DeWald’s personal service by briefly lending Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting to Princeton. DeWald once again rose to serve in 1966 when Florence’s Arno River flooded, causing catastrophic damage to the city’s cultural treasures. He remained a Princeton man to the end, dying shortly after attending a Princeton-Columbia football game in 1968.

The second of the Museum’s Monuments Men was Patrick Kelleher (1918–1985), who succeeded DeWald as director of the Art Museum in 1960 and served until 1972. Like DeWald (but a full generation younger), Kelleher trained at Princeton, completing his M.F.A. in 1942 and his Ph.D. in 1947, specializing in early Christian art. Kelleher led the Greater Hesse Division of the MFAA and was involved in the recovery and safeguarding, respectively, of two of Europe’s great cultural treasures: the head of Nefertiti now in the Berlin Museum and Saint Stephen’s Crown, the thousand-year-old Hungarian national symbol. During his tenure as director at Princeton, Kelleher carried out the Museum’s first modern building campaign that led to the erection of the 1966 International Style building that remains the Museum’s core. He also led the selection of the first twenty-one sculptures for the John B. Putnam Jr. Memorial Collection for the Princeton campus, honoring a hero of the Class of 1945 who died in 1944 while serving as a fighter pilot.

DeWald and Kelleher were not Princeton’s only Monuments Men, having been joined by S. Lane Faison (Graduate School Class of 1932), Craig Hugh Smyth (Class of 1938, Graduate School Class of 1956), and Charles Parkhurst (Graduate School Class of 1941), as well as Robert Koch (Graduate School Classes of 1949 and 1954), who went on to teach at Princeton for forty-two years and was the last of our surviving Monuments Men, dying only two years ago. My own career has intersected with the legacy of the Monuments Men on multiple occasions: Frederick Hartt taught me as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, and Charles Sawyer preceded me as director at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and was the most subtle and generous of mentors. I have long known something of their service, a record of personal sacrifice that is to my mind one of the great manifestations of Princeton’s informal motto of service to the nation and to all nations. With the upcoming February release of the major Hollywood film The Monuments Men, in which such megawatt personalities as George Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, and Cate Blanchett inhabit the roles of the Monuments Men and their civilian colleagues, their record of service is sure to inhabit the public imagination as never before.

James Christen Steward 
Director